Gathering the NeXt Generation: Essays on the Formation and Ministry of GenX Priests
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Gathering the NeXt Generation: Essays on the Formation and Ministry of GenX Priests
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819225252 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/26/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Gathering the Next Generation
Essays on the Formation and Ministry of GenX Priests
By N. J. A. Humphrey
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2000 Nathan HumphreyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2525-2
CHAPTER 1
Tomorrow's World, Tomorrow's Church, Tomorrow's Leaders
Richard Kew
Watching too much of the X-Files over the years has probably contributed substantially to my sense of paranoia. But I sometimes wonder if there isn't a conspiracy around the Episcopal Church to make sure certain awkward questions are never asked. If there is, then clearly I am not in on the loop.
Somewhere around the mid-1980s, when I had passed my fortieth birthday and could no longer be considered young by any definition of that word, I began asking, "What are the criteria dioceses apply in selecting candidates for ordination?" This led naturally to, "Why are Episcopalians so determined to select for ordination almost everyone but the young, the energetic, and the entrepreneurial?" Interpreted as unworthy criticism of the ordination process, these questions were studiously ignored. Others who were asking the same questions received similar treatment.
More than a decade later we are able to see the devastating consequences of this myopia playing themselves out. What had been avoidable has in the meantime turned into a simmering, but still almost unacknowledged, crisis whose repercussions will be with us for many years. We have so ignored the younger end of our clergy force that today a mere 2 percent of our ordained leadership is under thirty-five. In an increasingly Generation X world, the Episcopal Church has burned almost all its generational bridges to the younger half of the population.
The last quarter-century may have brought greater breadth of gender and race into the church's ordained leadership, but it has been overwhelmingly at the expense of the young, the dynamic, and those with an evangelistic compulsion. What is required is imagination, creativity, and nothing short of an ecclesiastical equivalent of the Marshall Plan. If we do not begin this undertaking, then I suggest that the future looks bleak for the Episcopal Church. It ought to be the task of my generation, those of us in our late forties, fifties, and early sixties, not only to identify and mentor young leaders, but to let go of some of our leadership and make it possible for them to use their charisms in shaping tomorrow's church. If we do not, then we will have been guilty of thoughtless and shortsighted irresponsibility.
Blame for our plight can be liberally shared, but Commissions on Ministry must take their full share. I believe commissions should be the diocesan visionaries. They should have been asking and seeking to answer the question, "What kind of clergy will tomorrow's missionary church need?" Instead, they have tended to become bureaucratic panels culling volunteers from the "Boomer" and "silent" generations, rather than seeking trailblazers from Generation X and the Millennial Generation. The system favors "company" men and women, which means that far too many type A personalities, the young, and entrepreneurs—people tomorrow's church most desperately needs—are politely turned away. A church mired in "process" does not want people who might upset the apple cart!
Shortsightedness prevails whichever way you slice it. For most dioceses "long-term" planning is more about meeting budget and divining which clergy slots will need to be filled in the next year or two, rather than developing an ongoing strategy to make themselves dynamic and missionary twenty-five years down the road. A by-product of such forethought would be a determined effort to find and train appropriate leadership. Instead, Commissions on Ministry persist in functioning like ecclesiastical civil-service examiners, driven by a well-oiled but cumbersome set of procedures that are unimaginatively applied.
We have now successfully built a rapidly aging clergy force, who despite its greater comprehensiveness is mostly equipped to maintain the church it received—and then to retire within a decade or two. Having spent more than twenty years traveling the length and breadth of North American Anglicanism, I sadly report that most of us presently in leadership cannot even conceive, let alone build, the sort of church that will speak and live with the power and grace of Christ in the emerging world.
Twice during the month I was writing this essay, I talked to diocesan staffs who had a burning vision to develop new congregations. These folks are utterly frustrated because they are unable to find the church-planters they need. During the same period I was informally approached by another diocese asking, because I have been at the front end of so many new ventures in the church, if I would be prepared to plant a new parish for them. I was flattered to be considered, but things have reached a sorry pass if in the absence of younger and more energetic clergy, a fiftysomething like me is courted to undertake this most exciting (and most exacting) of all missionary challenges.
In the last few paragraphs I have been spilling the bad news. I have merely diagnosed, not solved, a mammoth opportunity (packaged as a problem) that is before us. The solution would be relatively simple if all that was needed was to fill seminaries with enthusiastic and intelligent young men and women—but just being young and studying theology does not necessarily turn someone into the sort of priest that we really need. If tomorrow's church is to be healthy we should be diligently seeking, selecting, and training transformational leaders.
What Do Transformational Leaders Look Like?
Transformational leaders come in all shapes and sizes. They are people with a variety of gifts and skills, but what they have in common is that all they are and have has been surrendered to the service of Jesus Christ. A rich variety of characters and personalities, they are people doggedly determined obediently to go wherever God directs. Some will be church-planters, others skilled at bringing life to tired old parishes, and others still, the neatest pastors in the world.
A primary characteristic of such obedience is a willingness to lead regardless of criticism and personal cost. Anyone can gaze into the future, dream dreams, and see visions; what makes a leader is the ability to turn excellent ideas into working realities. This means being able to communicate the vision so others can share it—and help improve upon it. There are Lone Rangers aplenty, but those who can build a team around a God-given vision are worth their weight in gold. In Pauline terms this is "equipping the saints for the work of ministry" (Eph. 4:12). Leadership that transforms is leadership that builds a Christian community until it shines forth the love of Christ, is able to stand on its own feet, and has the capacity not just to maintain, but to multiply itself.
The most effective Christian leaders, whether they are in the limelight or live out their ministries in obscurity, are those who have learned to be douloi, slaves of Jesus Christ. Their audience is not the gallery but their Lord. What is important to doulos leaders is not the size of their salary package, or their career prospects, but a willingness to go where God sends them, to do what God requires of them—period.
One of the tragedies in the late-twentieth-century church has been a "professionalization" of the ministry that has raised up managers rather than leaders, therapists rather than pastors, maintainers rather than missioners. The modern church tends to be led by those who see ministry in terms of career rather than lifelong selfless abandonment to Jesus Christ. As we look around the church, it is not surprising then that transformation is the exception rather than the rule.
Christian leadership is deeply rooted in worship and personal devotion. Leaders who make a lasting difference have hearts formed and shaped in prayer. Spirituality is not just something about which they talk—they live it, and it energizes their very being. Their personal integrity flows from a relationship with God that is nurtured in prayer, contemplation, worship, and study—especially of the scriptures. These are the characteristics of tomorrow's leaders, for these qualifications are the ones that will ultimately make the difference.
I was not formed in a setting that took Catholic symbolism seriously; therefore I came late to the notion that the priest's stole represents the yoke of Christ. As the years have gone by, however, when I have put on my stole I have found myself warming to this notion as both a gentle reminder and a goad. It reminds me that I am called to carry a cross with the One who died for me on the cross. It is a goad because it illustrates how far short I have fallen, and how much I am in need of God's grace if I am to fulfill the fearful responsibility that is at the core of the priesthood.
In a world becoming far less friendly toward the Christian faith, tomorrow's Christian leaders are not entering a respected profession, but a vocation that requires them to "give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest." According to several people charged with reviewing possible retirement patterns of clergy over the next twenty to twenty-five years, if tomorrow's church is to affect culture in any significant way we are going to need as many as five thousand young men and women willing to lay aside ambition and affluence to take up the enormous challenge of rebuilding.
One of the greatest challenges facing the church is how to identify, train, form, deploy, and support such leaders. This task is going to mean a radical rethinking of everything from diocesan ordination processes to our approach to theological education. The more I ponder this enterprise, the more I conclude that as the Christendom era becomes a memory, it will be increasingly to the early church that we look for inspiration. In those first centuries theology took place not in academic captivity, but in the rough-and-tumble of pastoral and missional life. This past reality provides significant clues to the correctives needed if the present system is to meet the opportunities of a new millennium.
What Will Tomorrow's World and Church Look Like?
When asked several years ago by The Christian Century to comment on the encounter between a fast-changing world and the churches, Loren Mead said:
I don't see a lot of change. There's a theory about what happens when an institution hits the wall. The first stage is shock. The second is defensive reaction. The third is acknowledgement. Fourth is adaptation. In my experience, the mainline churches ... have hit a wall. A lot of things they thought would work aren't working. And as far as I can tell, some of the leaders have moved as far as defensive retreat. But an awful lot of people are in total denial and not even into shock yet. And I don't see many signs of acknowledging the depth of the problem or the crisis we're in the middle of.
Things may not be quite as stuck as they were when Father Mead spoke these words, but the prevailing ecclesiastical mood still seems one of denial rather than embracing reality. While in some circles it might be slowly dawning that the world has become a very different place, few have grasped just how radical the changes are and how profound the implications will be for the Christian community. To use a sporting analogy, it is not only as if the rules were constantly being altered, but the shape and size of the field.
During the last third of the twentieth century we have been watching the demise of Christendom in the West. Its disappearance, like the mighty hull of the Titanic beneath the chill Atlantic, means we can no longer pretend that our culture is predominantly Judeo-Christian. Yet today's church, from national to parish levels, is still designed to pastor an environment shaped by Christendom, not to be a missionary people in a less than welcoming world. While wherever we look there are echoes and memories of our culture's Christian heritage, with each passing year the flavor of society becomes more pre-Constantinian.
In a few short years the Christian faith has become just one among many options in a pluralistic smorgasbord of offerings. During the next generation the huge task before the church is to work out how it might best reconfigure to address the gospel message to a society in which truth has been relativized, and respectability granted to a bewildering variety of secular and even pagan ideas. My generation of clergy, which straddles this transition out of Christendom, is not as equipped as Xers to work out the implications of this fact on the way the church fulfills its future ministry.
The world entered the twentieth century with the West riding high. Our Victorian forebears looked forward to a promising future in which Christianity had to prevail. This optimism was shattered as war, wealth, and competing ideologies did devastating damage. Empires have disappeared, and the faith has been rotting in what was once the Christian heartland. Meanwhile, fledgling churches planted as a result of the global and missionary vision of earlier generations have flourished beyond anyone's wildest dreams and are now the standard-bearers of the faith.
In the days ahead, high on our list of priorities must be discovering how to stabilize our position in the West, and how to turn ourselves back into a society-transforming force through Jesus Christ. This notion will make extraordinary spiritual and intellectual demands upon leaders and led alike. Equally daunting, however, is how we enable creative cooperation between Western churches and dynamic churches from the Global South who want to share the challenges for gospel ministry appearing in our corner of God's vineyard.
If anything is to be learned from the Lambeth Conference of 1998, it is that our ministry dilemmas are to be shared, not kept to ourselves. But this sharing will require greater trust and humility than we seem able to muster at the moment. The creedal affirmation of belief in "one holy catholic and apostolic church" has, in the last few years, gone from being a nice ecclesial theory to a global reality that this coming generation must make work. Lambeth also illustrated how demanding it is for folks from an array of backgrounds and cultures to move forward in ministry together; perhaps Generation X's greater comfort with cultural variety is one of the gifts they bring to this process.
What makes this facet of tomorrow's challenge harder will be the difficulty of breaking yesterday's habits and old ways of thinking. Mission has become multidirectional, and no longer are resources—theological, material, and spiritual—going in the same direction. The older churches in the West desperately need a slice of spiritual dynamism from the younger churches, while the younger churches will continue to require resources of maturity and time. Learning to be respectful and to share will be more demanding than most imagine. Generation X may be in a better position to make this happen than those of us more set in older ways of thinking.
The approaching millennium has led pundits to paint numerous scenarios of the world's future. Whatever the differences in these scenarios, almost all agree that Western nations and their culture will never reign as supreme as they have. We are entering a period in which powers and civilizations will jostle for ascendancy, making tomorrow's world one of clashing ideals, ideas, values—and faiths.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gathering the Next Generation by N. J. A. Humphrey. Copyright © 2000 Nathan Humphrey. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword: Forward! The Most Reverend Frank T. Griswold
Preface: Conversation and Conversion N. J. A. Humphrey
Introduction: Gathering the Next Generation Christopher Martinxv
Section One: Formation and Ordination
Tomorrow's World, Tomorrow's Church, Tomorrow's Leaders Richard Kew
Ordination or Formation: Which Comes First, the Chicken or the Egg? Jamie
E. L'Enfant
Trusting the Process N. J. A. Humphrey
Section Two: Formation and Ministry
A Call for Curacy: Following a Residency Model by Getting Congregations
Involved as "Teaching Parishes" Benjamin A. Shambaugh
Youth's Authority: A Spiritual Revolution Margaret K. Schwarzer
Stole and Stethoscope: Challenges for Formation within the Context of
Bivocational Ministry Daniel Emerson Hall
Section Three: The Changing Faces of Ordained Ministry
ISO Peer Group: Episcopal Culture through an Xer Lens Beth Maynard
To Be Young, Priested, and Black: Raising Up the NeXt Generation of Black
Clergy Jennifer Lynn Baskerville
Conversion and Community Nancy A. Vogele
Preparing for Luke: Reflections by a Pregnant Priest Kate Moorehead
Section Four: Mission and Ministry for the New Millennium
The Future of Our Generation in the Church J. Scott Barker
A Living Church Serving a Living Lord: Mission and Ministry in the
Twenty-first Century Rock H. Schuler
Afterword: Continuing the Conversation, Continuing the Conversion N. J.
A. Humphrey
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments